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LATIN AMERICA FORUM

COWAP Conference “Women’s Safety in Dogmatic Times”

The COWAP conference in Kolkata (India), the first of its kind in the city, is on the theme of ‘Women’s Safety in Dogmatic Times’. It is a 2-day conference, to be held on 9th & 10th of March 2018, at the Gateway Hotel, Kolkata. The idea was to initiate a discourse on women and psychoanalysis with an interdisciplinary approach. Thus, the local planning & organizing committees comprised psychoanalysts, scholars from social sciences, psychiatrists and psychologists. This way it opened up the gate for psychoanalysis to enter the mainstream academic discourse of universities as well as other practicing fields of mental health in the city of Kolkata. Besides the IPA and COWAP, other collaborating & associating bodies for this conference are – Indian Psychoanalytical Society, West Bengal State University (Centre for Psychodynamic Studies), Crystal Minds, all from Kolkata, and the Psychoanalytic Study Group of the Dept of Psychology, Christ University, from Bangalore.

Women’s wellbeing and security in India has often depended on their gender positioning. Historically, women in India have been subjected to various forms of oppression and deprivation. Starting from sex selective abortions to domestic violence, bride burning for dowry and acid attacks, women in India wade through severe threats to their physical safety and survival at every juncture of their lives. These threats to women’s security have increased manifold with the progressive polarization and hardening of socio-political and cultural ideologies in recent times. As spaces for difference shrink and dogma dominates our public lives, women find themselves more marginalized than ever before. The promotion of a particular notion of ‘Indian culture’ is forcing women into ‘traditional’ roles in which they stand to lose many of their hard earned freedom, choices and opportunities. When women are refusing to conform to these restrictive norms they are being subjected to violence. Any attempt to challenge institutional hegemonies of marriage, religion or heterosexuality is leading to aggressive and punitive assaults. It is not surprising that the rates of crime against women are on the rise and the question for women’s safety and wellbeing is becoming urgent and critical. The broader sub-themes around which the 2-day COWAP conference in Kolkata would revolve around would comprise – (i) religion; (ii) intimacy and violence; (iii) dogma in the clinical Space; (iv) revisiting motherhood. Psychoanalysis and Social Sciences would engage with such concerns and reflect on the multi-layered psychological, socio-cultural, political aspects working upon them.